Dave Lovely wrote:
>I'm about half-a-dozen digests behind everybody,
Well, I'm if anything even further behind, Dave, and can't now
even backtrack to your post about Garrigue (it was _yours_, wasn't
it, asking about the pronunciation of "Jean" and commenting on "The
Mouse"?). As far as I know, her name was pronounced "gene"--and, yes,
very fine poem, "The Mouse"! I've lately been rereading her antiwar
poems from _Studies for an Actress_ and finding them extraordinary
all over again--extraordinarily _fresh_, for one thing you can't say
about many Vietnam-era American poems anymore. It seems to me now
that what made hers different then and keeps them so alive now is
related to her broader tendency toward a poetry of subjectivity, by
which I mean the way her poems tend to capture and then go off the
edge of a mental event, sometimes emotional, sometimes intellectual,
and as often as not corporeal--understanding as reached through
the body, her own or another's (such as the little girl's in "The
Smokeshop Owner's Daughter," e.g.)--so that her political poems then
proceeded from a truly politicized subjectivity. That's what remains
true and fresh in her antiwar poetry long after the war that was its
occasion and remains its instance has passed into history.
Dave, again:
>due to an innocent
>jaunt out to Liverpool - to see four of the most aptly juxtaposed
>exhibitions you could wish to see: Constable's Clouds at the Walker, &
>JMW Turner: The Sun is God, Douglas Gordon, and American Abstraction
>(Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell et al.) at the Tate - all meditations
>on clouds and light and various forms of airy nothingness that some
>might variously consider obscure or banal. Some of Turner's paintings,
>painted as long ago as the 1840s, and shown here stripped of the usual
>ornate gilt frames, are paintings of almost nothing, nothing even as
>discernible as the sea and the sky, not even a horizon line between the
>two. Luminous obscurity, you might say. Or as Stevens might have put it,
>"nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is".
Thanks for the news of this wonderful-sounding exhibit. It
reminded me of my youthful marveling over the clouds and light--
and fields--in Constable, of how I'd wonder where he'd seen such
things--until my first visit to England in 1976, that is. Then I had
the good luck to pass through Essex in the early evening and suddenly
"recognized" it as Constable country (oh, now I see!). It felt as if
I'd woken up to find myself inside the frame of one of his paintings
(or had gone to sleep and slipped into a dream he was having)--an
extraordinary experience, but probably one that many Americans seeing
England for the first time have had (and one that I've heard is common
among those seeing Paris for the first time after growing up on/with
its art or literature--a species of cultural deja-vu?).
Appreciated your insights into Ashbery (below) as well--a poet who's
been important for me, too, and one from whose "articular shear" (in
Geraldine McKenzie's--I think--gorgeous phrase) I've learned a lot. But
it's because his work continues to remain tantalizingly out of reach or
beyond my mind's grasp that it also remains fresh to me, whether I'm
returning to the endlessly intriguing _Convex Mirror_ or have thrown
myself into (and thereby made an element of my own thrownness, in the
Heideggerian sense) a new Ashbery work. His poetry _kindles_ something
in me, and--going to the "eschew/clarity" thread, particularly Gillian's
recent post addressing "virtuosity" (and the limits thereof, for her)--
that kindling is experienced as what I'd call "fire-stick" or "firebreak"
poetry in that something like a fire in the mind can be ignited by the
same quality which is directing or controlling that conflagration, namely,
the poet's extraordinary degree of technical virtuosity. In the presence
of such virtuosity, whether poetic or musical (responding now more or
less directly to Gillian), it seems unlikely to me that the poem in
which it's immanent is a hollow vessel of any sort. On the contrary,
it generates a trust in me, as a reader, that my efforts to see what's
there, in and as the poem, will not go unrewarded. (Prynne has the same
kindling effect on me, btw.)
Candice
>On John Ashbery,
>who in certain periods of his career, is one of the poets who has meant
>most to me, various inchoate, unformed things strike me at this hour,
>most of which I can't even begin to articulate now. One is that
>'banality' is a register, a tone, even a subject, like any other - he
>once said - and this may have been to me, since I had the pleasure of
>interviewing him once, for a local (Manchester, England) zine called
>'Debris', that he was interested in cliches 'since they didn't get to be
>cliches for no reason'. Another is that there's a characteristic trope
>in many of his poems about something great and wonderful being about to
>happen, which either never does, or is indefinitely postponed, or is
>missed by the protagonist or speaker of the poem. If I was less tired,
>I could cite examples, but it's one of the main things I could point to
>to attempt to expain why I find his work, at it's best, poignant, and
>full of meaning. Then there's the sheer variety of his tonal
>register(s). I might go on, but I've had a long day...
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